


Because each time we live

by grainjew



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Genre: Autistic Link (Legend of Zelda), Gen, Introspective Nonsense, Memories, Reincarnation, So That Defeat Timeline Huh, also requisite reminder that im allergic to shipping, the maidens have real personalities now because i said so, therefore there is no romance in this Fan Fictione, this started out as a mood piece and then things happened and its still a mood piece
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:08:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22037569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grainjew/pseuds/grainjew
Summary: Link remembers dying, and he's pretty sure this is all his fault.He doesn't know why, he just remembers that last time — whateverlast timemeans — he failed.Help me,says the voice, and in that place between dream and waking he can put a thousand faces to it, a thousand hands, a thousand gaits.I am a prisoner in the dungeon of the castle. My name is Zelda.
Relationships: Link & Zelda (Legend of Zelda)
Comments: 17
Kudos: 68





	Because each time we live

**Author's Note:**

> i seriously considered adding ocarina of time as an extra fandom tag because this leans almost more heavily on oot than it does on alttp haha

Link remembers dying, and he's pretty sure this is all his fault. 

He doesn't know why, he just remembers that last time — whatever _last time_ means — he failed.

 _Help me,_ says the voice, and in that place between dream and waking he can put a thousand faces to it, a thousand hands, a thousand gaits. _I am a prisoner in the dungeon of the castle. My name is Zelda._

He wakes. In the back of his mind, there is fire, and rage, and shattered blue porcelain. 

_Agahnim has seized control of the castle and is now trying to open the Seven Sages’ seal._

In the front of his mind, there is the voice, calling to him, reaching into his soul and dragging it north with familiarity. There is a gash in his stomach, spilling guts and agony onto stone. No. He reaches down, and finds himself whole.

_…I am in the dungeon of the castle. Please help me…_

In a blurry haze, he watches his uncle pull down the sword and shield from the wall, throw on a vest, belt the sword to his waist. He half-hears his uncle tell him to stay home and wait for morning, and half-sees the door shut. 

And normally, he listens to his uncle, who took him in when he had nothing, who knows all the stories in the whole world. But — his uncle is a kindly man, who retired from the castle guard years ago and doesn’t believe anymore in using a sword. And Link knows, knows, _knows_ this isn’t his uncle’s destiny, from a place deeper in him than presumption or pride. 

Link knows that it has to be him, because he _failed_ last time, and because Zelda’s voice has settled like a missing piece into his spirit.

It should be harder than it is, to sneak into Hyrule Castle. But he’s strangely alert, strangely alive, and there is a guiding touch on his mind, rattling off hidden alcoves and changes of guard. There is the memory of dying to lend him caution, and the memory of failing to lend him speed.

 _I spent my whole life to now learning the castle’s secret passages,_ Zelda says, smug beneath the fear. _Knew it would pay off someday._

Link doesn’t _like_ to sneak. He’d much rather charge the main gates and let come what comes, but he trusts Zelda with an enduring fire and, when he stops to think, there really is not much he can do against the entire castle guard with a lantern. 

And then the stench of blood is thick in his nostrils, and his lantern is dancing red ember-light over flesh and fabric, and Link is on the ground clutching at his uncle’s hand. 

“Link, I didn’t want you involved with this,” rasps his uncle, voice weak. His hands are clammy, and Link wishes wishes _wishes_ and feels his failure all over again when wishing yields nothing. “I told you not to leave the house…”

Link holds on with desperate strength and wonders what he would say if he could coax the spiderwebs in his throat into giving up words. 

“Take my sword and shield and listen to me,” says his uncle. Link, in that moment his uncle’s nephew, a boy with no destiny and no memories beyond his own, is very good at listening. “Link,” says his uncle, voice catching, smiling wanly, “you can do it! Save the princess… Zelda is your…”

He stops speaking, and Link, numbly, fills in the rest of the sentence in his mind, _battle-partner, destiny, voice of reason, sister, friend— Uncle, Uncle who did this to you— Who took you from me?_

His uncle's sword and shield feel too familiar in his hands when he finally stands up from next to the body, blood cooling in the fabric of his tunic and tears pooling desperate in his eyes. And every sword-strike after is an elegy and a dirge.

When he unlocks her cell, Zelda takes his face in her hands and kisses him lightly on the forehead, like a blessing, like a memory.

“I couldn’t hear you,” she says. “But you could hear me?”

Link hums the first three notes of the royal family’s lullaby, and she smiles. 

And then she ties her dress at the corner for easier movement, and borrows his boomerang, and they set to the business of escaping.

And they've never met, but it's like they've never been apart.

“Be safe,” she says. He hopes she doesn’t remember what he looked like, bleeding out. He hopes she remembers to be safe too, between her worrying and her wards and her wisdom. 

He nods, and steps out the Sanctuary door, and pretends his heart doesn’t know that this is some kind of goodbye.

It’s lonely, this life. Last time, when he failed, he had a friend. He knows this, same as he knows the secret path through the Lost Woods. He knows she was knowledgeable beyond compare, and a light in any darkness, and that she screamed, heartbroken and eerie, when he died.

He can’t remember her name, though.

He fumbles for it, desperate, night after night as he tries to sleep. The urgency of it eclipses the urgency of his quest, sometimes, leaves him to lose his rhythm in fights as he chases down fragments of memory. Wounded in his shield-arm, he tries to ask Sahasrahla for her name, but the words stick in his throat, like they always do. She would always speak for him, he remembers that too.

Sahasrahla has never heard him speak.

He tries again, and then gives up. 

Maybe with the Pendant of Wisdom in hand, he’ll remember.

(He doesn’t.)

Link had gotten kicked in the face by a rabbit, once. It had made him cry, and it hadn't helped, either, that after tending his bruised cheek his uncle had told him all matter of fact that that was just what happened when you cornered a rabbit and stuck your face in its face.

Link thinks about that as he tries to adjust to powerful hind legs and a height of approximately one foot. In some ways, it is effortless: the Dark World reshapes you into a reflection of your truest self, so something of that rabbit has always been with him. There is a certain sort of wariness he has always carried in his dreams and in his bones, and a tendency to fight back viciously when cornered. A skittishness in him that he has never liked to admit to. A love of sleep. But he is also tangling paws into each other as he tries to walk and wrestling an instinct that demands he find a corner and _hide, predators loom._

He realizes with mild surprise as he stands himself back up that the transformation hadn't hurt at all — somewhere to the side, somewhere a step and a path and a world away, he hears an echo of his own scream as his form is ripped from him, leaving him a wolf, and he wonders. 

He wonders why in one life he is a predator, and another, he is prey.

The Lost Woods are full of phantoms. He ducks through underbrush and makes choices on instinct and follows the song that echoes through his mind, calling, calling, from another time entirely. He thinks he sees children, sometimes. Other times, it’s skeletons, or dropped rupees. 

And then the Master Sword is before him, standing tall and splendid and clothed in stone. Zelda must have brought it, after he died. It would allow nobody else to touch it, but it— it— _I am a servant of the Goddess_ — it would recognize her. He knows, deep in him, that it would recognize her. 

Pendants clattering at his neck, he takes slow steps up the pedestal, then grabs hold of the handle — familiar purple, Din and Nayru making answer to Farore’s own green — and _pulls._

A breath of power courses through him. He angles the sword skywards, and exhilaration spins into joy.

 _I missed you, I missed you,_ sings the sword. 

He has failed again. He has failed again, and all the brilliance of his sword, all the memory, all the wishing will not stop another man bleeding to death beside him, because he was just too late, and just too slow. 

Sanctuary’s keeper had given Zelda refuge despite everything, and now he has just enough life and breath in him left to tell Link what has happened and point him where to go and say, _please._ The air is thick with dust and silence. 

Sanctuary’s keeper stops breathing at all. 

Link (has failed) works best with a goal to drive him, with an objective to pursue: single-minded focus pulls him up the heights of Hyrule Castle’s tower, the Master Sword a gleaming arc of silver in his hands and his heartbeat loud in his ears. He failed. He has to get to Zelda, he—

 _has failed._ _  
__is dying._ _  
__watches her seal herself in amber._ _  
__meets her ghost._ _  
__sees her encased in stone._ _  
__knows she will not wake._  
 _watches her die._ _  
_is dying, and it hurts.

arrives in Agahnim’s chambers just in time to watch him banish Princess Zelda to the Dark World. Just in time to be powerless to stop it. Just in time to— do nothing of use.

But he can fight; that unbreakable thing at the core of him, that cornered rabbit, that cornered wolf: they say, always, _fight back._ And it’s futile, but he strikes at Agahnim, rage and desperation and guilt guiding his sword, and he _wins,_ even, and yet that victory too is a failure. In his despair, Link misses an incantation, misses a gathering of power, misses a planting of the feet, and as payment for that inattention is flung, defeated, into the Dark World.

A whirl of color, a painful drop onto something hard, a rush of wind. Link’s world narrows to sandstone, to heavy air, to silent sobs that send him shaking until he falls on his stomach, too exhausted to move.

He failed.

He breathes, and each breath rattles through him like a tree in a storm.

He failed, again.

He failed.

But the unbreakable thing, and the cornered rabbit, and the cornered wolf, and the memory of failure say, _go on._ They say, _do what you can._

Link works best with a goal, and there are people to save, here. There are the Maidens who were taken, and there is Zelda. 

He is the Hero. He will do his duty. 

That is all that matters — all that _can_ matter, because the unbreakable thing in him refuses to give up even in the face of the Dark World’s suffocating, transformative malice.

He failed, but he will bear that weight.

The walls of the Palace of Darkness’s innermost sanctum fade to black as though the whole world is being swept up in the wings of night, vast and spattered with stars like embers from a blacksmith’s hammer. 

“Thanks for coming, Hero,” says a voice like a mountain’s voice. Link whirls, and then lowers his sword as his eyes meet those of the Maiden of Fire. He looks away, and she giggles. He adjusts his cap. She’s a Goron, and even her laughter resonates. “Unfortunately there is only so much you can do for me.”

Link tilts his head. She’s taller than him, with arms that could dent steel, but that’s obvious because she’s a Goron. She’s grinning, too, even though she’s telling him bad news. Probably because it’s the first time in ages she’s seen anyone other than guards. 

“This crystal is — well, we don’t have time for the technical details; I’ll explain when Agahnim is defeated — but it’s a complicated bit of sorcery, which means that it is essentially unbreakable.”

Link mimes smashing it with his hammer. She shakes her head solemnly. He makes a face. 

“I’m with you there, brother,” she says, giggling again. Then she clears her throat. “Once the seven of us are together, we'll be able to deal with the problem easy, if my books are at all correct. In the meantime, it’s on you to gather us and keep us safe. Can you?”

Link nods — he will _not_ fail, not this time, not again, not on his life and death and memories — and she smiles at him, and she shuts her eyes. Like a curtain drawn, he is standing once more in the Dark World, all the crushing terror of it: with careful hands, he tucks away her crystal.

That boy in the forest asks him to find a lost flute, and Link, too familiar with phantom notes in his ears, under his fingers, agrees in a heartbeat. 

But what he digs up is an ocarina, all unadorned blue porcelain, and the sight of it leaves his hands shaking. The ocarina he knows shattered at his death, and the color of this one is too pale, the lacquer too rough, the shape all wrong. There is no pattern of triangles emblazoned on it to hint at untapped power, and the number of holes is entirely wrong. But still, the echo is deafening.

For an hour or more, he runs through all the songs he knows, all the strings of notes and scraps of phrases he can piece together from his memories and his instincts. A rare few, he can complete and he can name. 

The rest only leave impressions.

He turns the ocarina over in his hands, marveling, terrified of dropping it. The Dark World’s not-sky makes him small, and in defiance, he wraps melodies around himself.

For the boy in the forest, he plays a song that calms the restless dead and eases the living into shape, and when he turns to go, he leaves behind a tree with leaves through which the wind can sing.

"Honestly! Royal family should have figured out this is what isolationism would get them!" The Maiden of Water is an old woman, and radiant with age. She's Zora, the tips of her fins fading blue to a washed-out sort of grey, and she doesn't much like Hylians. She huffs. “And we were such stalwart allies to them before the war, too.”

Link ducks his head in apology for his people, because it seems the right thing to do.

She sighs brusquely. "For Sage Ruto's sake - may her memory be for a blessing - I'll make an exception for you, little Hero, but,” she gestures, a sweeping motion like brushing dust off a table, “I'll be giving that princess of yours a piece of my mind when we find her. The nerve of that Agahnim!"

Ruto. That name. Link remembers her: graceful, demanding, dutiful. 

Slowly, haltingly, he sounds out the notes of a song — a serenade, he thinks — on the ocarina, missing notes until the Maiden of Water joins her voice to the instrument and they sing a waterfall of sound that washes him back to the Dark World.

It’s so lonely, even with the Maidens. They can only muster the power to speak to him occasionally, and even knowing that they’re there is hardly any comfort against the way the Dark World presses in on him, the way the Dark World isolates and transforms and makes him small. It's so lonely. It’s _so_ lonely.

The Maiden of Forest is Kokiri, and the shadows on her face dance. 

“We could be Sages,” she says to Link. There is something ageless in her eyes. “The world forgot how to awaken us, but we could be Sages. Our power is so limited, now, like this. And the wizard sapped what little we had. I wish…"

Link hums three notes of a song, and she blinks.

"You remember her!” Astonishment layers itself atop agelessness. Link looks at a green tunic and cropped hair and string bracelets, and thinks that someone so oddly familiar, so obviously just a little younger than him, should not feel like a creature he cannot comprehend. “The Sage before me, you remember her!"

He remembers a hug. He remembers an ocarina — but not the one that broke — and a hug, and an enduring kindness. And a song. He remembers a song.

"They say she disappeared right after the Imprisoning War. But she left her song with the Maiden who taught me. And you remember it! Does that mean you remember how to awaken us, too, 'cause you're the Hero?"

He nods, and then shakes his head, and then shrugs. Hums a few more bars of that song to try to make her face less dim. Raises the ocarina and, with care, plays a minuet. 

She brightens, a little.

The Dark World has no sky. The landscape is reflected, instead, like a massive illusory mirror, mountains dripping down like icicles and fields sketching a patchwork ceiling. To look up is to be overwhelmed, is to be crushed, is to see, miniature with distance, someone not-quite-you looking back.

To be the rabbit had been to be so afraid. Every time Link looks up at the not-sky, he remembers that crushing weight of fear, and he understands from deep in his gut that the Dark World itself is the predator to run from. 

The Maiden of Shadow is Sheikah, Link thinks, but she is as quiet as he. They exchange nods, and she traces the Sheikah eye on his forehead with a finger, and he thinks that at last he has found someone who shares the weight of knowing you failed.

For her, he plays a nocturne, and the shadows close around them like a quilt.

_Her name was Navi._

The Maiden of Light is Human, with the coarse clothing and coarse manner of a farmer. She reminds Link of his mother, the one or two memories he has of her, and also of other women he cannot name, from other lives and other times. She reminds him of the kind of woman who would tell him he had done well, even though he failed. She doesn’t, though.

Instead she says, “Kid, you been by Lon Lon Ranch back in the Light World?”

Link shakes his head _no,_ and the way her face falls is like dying all over again.

“Nevermind,” she says, and sighs. “I’m a farmhand there, just wanted to know if the place was still standing.” 

Link makes a face that he hopes is sympathetic.

“Ah, don’t worry about it, kid. Folks there are strong, don’t you worry. You’re the Hero, no?” He nods. “Then you’ve got other things to worry about. Let’s get to it.”

Link brings the ocarina to his lips, and the prelude to something bright and new spills from it.

“It’s more of a,” the Maiden of Spirit waves her hand side to side, equivocating. She’s Gerudo, hair the color of dawn. “A spiritual descendance sort of thing, I guess? Like, you’re not s’posed to have kids, if you’re a Sage. ‘Cepting the Princess of course.” She shrugs, eloquently. “I’m s’posed to know this stuff, but I’d only been training a few months when Agahnim got the drop on me.”

Link makes a sympathetic noise and studies her, in between patching his tunic. He’s running low on thread. She doesn’t look anything like the Sage of Spirit he sees silhouetted around her when he closes his eyes, and he thinks that's pretty much alright. He thinks it's good, that she's alive, because he doesn't know much of the history he wasn't alive for but he knows Hyrule wasn't kind to the Gerudo, after the Imprisoning War.

“‘Course,” she adds, “I’m half again your age, looks like, and you’re out there doing what you can, so I s’pose I shouldn’t be complaining.” She waves her hand again, and then picks at the collar of her shirt. “Everything’s ending, can you hear it? The Princess, calling us from Turtle Rock?”

She stares at him, and eventually, remembering to listen, he nods. 

“I can feel your spirit…” He looks up at the murmur, tying off his stitching. She’s got a far-away look on her face, eyes hooded, serene against the darkness surrounding them. “Unbreakable. And so old, like sandstone: layered and weathered. There’s a song there, a prayer for the dead; let me—” 

She sounds out a phrase, doubling over notes to correct herself, an uncertain thing. Link reaches for the ocarina to learn off her and help her along, but the motion makes her blink, and she stops. “Sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t’a gotten distracted like that, I think?”

Link plays the first phrase of the requiem back to her, in answer, and lets his sorrow and grief and guilt well in him and spill into the notes until she understands.

There is a flash of many-colored light, and then all the crystals _burst_ , sending shards of unbreakable diamond and quartz to scatter light around the depths of Turtle Rock. And in that shock of sound and color, the Maidens each take form, and among them — hair in disarray, dress in tatters, radiant in her power:

“ _Zelda._ ” 

Emotion pushes the word through the spiderwebs clogging Link’s thoat, barely audible. It _clinks_ as it hits the floor, and he touches fingers to his lips, but nothing else makes it out. 

“I’m flattered,” says Zelda, affection edging sarcasm, and he thinks she must be remembering how seldom he finds himself able to speak. He thinks she must have had a lot of time, in this prison, to hone her remembering.

She runs to him, and pulls him into a hug so that his face impacts her shoulder and he can feel the solidity of her. 

She says, “I was lonely.”

He nods into her shoulder, wiping tears on the fabric of her dress. _Me too._

“I was so lonely, but you always come, no matter what I pull you into,” she whispers, hushed. “Every life. Thank you. I’m so sorry.”

He holds on tighter, grounding himself in the texture of muslin and the wetness against his cheek.

“You didn’t fail, Link,” she adds, after awhile, and he jerks his head up to stare at her. “Not this time, not any time, not even last time. You bought us time and a reprieve with your life, Hero.” She takes his face in her hands again, and, stunned, he lets her. “You gave us what we needed. You always have.” 

Then she lets go, glances away. “If anybody failed last time, Link, it was me,” she admits. Looks at the Maidens, and then away. Link wants to tell her she’s wrong, but he doesn’t know how. “I let my grief and my fear control me, after the war, and I did things in the name of Hyrule that I am not proud of. There is blood on my hands. But—” And here she grabs Link’s wrists, with conviction unmatched in all the world. “You _did not fail._ I accept my responsibility to mend what I burned — you must accept that everything you gave was enough, and more.”

Zelda’s fingers are like steel, like stone, and her gaze burns a hole in his forehead. He nods. 

Zelda releases her grip.

“Now: rest, Link,” she says, stepping away. “I have wrongs to right and a duty to fulfill, and you have done so much for us.”

Link nods again, all his mind whirling until he can hardly see, and fumbles for the ocarina, leans back against a wall. Absently, he plays as his fingers decide, draining his overwhelm through the notes and offering them out to the air and the worlds and the flow of time.

Zelda walks among the Maidens, meanwhile, and speaks to each of them softly, hushed and solemn. And each time, when she steps away, they are standing taller and humming a familiar song.

“Sage of Fire,” she names, and comes back to stand by Link. Their gazes follow her. “Sage of Light, Sage of Forest. Sage of Shadow, Sage of Water. Sage of Spirit. May Nayru guide you each on the path for which you were chosen, and may you stand as beacons to a brighter future for us all.” 

The Sage of Forest smiles. The Sage of Water looks so much less bitter.

Zelda gestures with an arm and bows formally. “Now I beg you, for the sake of our world: please lend me your aid!”

Glorious, resplendent with power, an echo amplified out of a time long past, turning the Dark World sacred again by their simple presence, the Seven Sages go to shatter Ganon’s defenses. And Link follows after, as the guilt seeded deep in his bones blossoms into hope for the future.

He tilts his chin up. _You killed me last time._ Ganon narrows his eyes, and Link moves his blade out in front of him, a challenge. _This time, our roles reverse._

He takes courage from other timelines, other cycles, other selves: 

And he strikes.

It’s so hard, to picture a better world. But the Triforce is cool and golden under his fingers, sparking wish-power like electricity through his veins, like fire running the length of his bones. 

He summons scraps of happiness. He calls to mind flickers of other lives when creation was something beautiful — the tiny birds, Zelda’s hand in his as she drags him around a festival at dizzying speeds, the soft gloam of twilight — and memories from this instance. His uncle’s stewed cucco they always had for important days. Zelda’s eyes, alight. The steadiness of his feet on the ground and magic just under his skin. Making lives _better._

The persistence of hope, and the reality of second chances.

He wishes: _May the world be made right._

And it is so.

**Author's Note:**

> so yeah apparently getting back into zelda is just... a winter thing for me now.  
> not that it particularly matters to the consumption of this fic, but this link is adjacent to the link i wrote in my wind waker fics (the postman's creed series) last year. i mean obviously they're different people, but the same principles of reincarnation and memory and loneliness are at play


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